It's free (in all senses), it's powerful, it's growing all the time. And you don't run the risk to lose your software because some company bought the rights over your software and terminated it. In this video, 90% of the video edition I made in Blender.

MakeHuman – http://www.makehuman.org – you never seen a software like this to create characters. You can customize ALL the aspects: gender, weight, ethnicity, height, musculature, eyes, ears, lips, teeth, asymmetries, etc, etc, etc. Each character become unique. It's a software in development, but already useable. It's opensource.

Gimp – www.gimp.org – it's opensource, very practical and powerful to treat photos, create images, little animations, MANY effects (and I mean it), you must to have it.

Fruity Loops – www.image-line.com/flstudio – proprietary music software, but not so expensive, and with a sophisticated set of sounds, effects and tools.

Melody Assistant – www.myriad-online.com – proprietary music software, but very cheap (U$ 37), and perfect to compose music in partitures. It comes with a lot of flavors of instruments: violin, drums, guitar, piano, metals etc. Melody and Harmony Assistant was created by two brothers, Didier Guillion and Olivier Guillion, and they have a staff of one person: Sylvie Ricard.

Vue – www.e-onsoftware.com – here we are talking about a big dog: Vue is widely used in the movie industry, mainly to create natural environments, with trees, water and realistic skies. The Vue Complete version costs U$ 599,00. Vue xStream costs U$ 1,695. The basic version costs U$ 199,00 and there are a basic free version here, that is costless for non-commercial use, but is not opensource. The animated RLD vignette was done with Vue.

Kdenlive – www.kdenlive.org – free and opensource video editor for GNU-Linux. A lot of resources here. Perfect, for example, to put titles, subtitles and text in video, without the need of import text as images.